Today, I've had a banking site and two bill pay sites show that they're down because of "website maintenance". This has never happened to me before, especially with a banking website during business hours. I'm wondering if there is something widespread going on with security issues.

Google "Microsoft takedown" You may be seeing collateral damage from the MS FUBAR'd No-ip takedown.

I believe those are I.T. code words for "We applied a Microsoft hotfix that was supposed to be transparent to users, but it borked everything up. We are now following the Microsoft recommended solution for everything - reboot ten times then reinstall the OS. Please stand by ..."

Happens all the time.

My domain started resolving late yesterday so it looks like the hostage crisis is over. Still a pain though. Have to use Microsoft at work, lost many hours due to sharepoint just loosing updates or Excel crashing or the same formula in two spreadsheets not giving the same results. Haven't use anything Microsoft at home in a decade yet they still manage to cause issues for me.